Tunisia presidential election: Who is running and what is at stake?

Just two candidates, one recently jailed, have been approved to challenge incumbent Kais Saied in the October 6 poll.

On October 6, Tunisians will head to the polls for the first round of a presidential election that opposition critics say is rigged in favour of President Kais Saied and could sound the death knell for Tunisia’s democracy.

Just two candidates have been approved to run against the incumbent in Sunday’s poll: left-wing nationalist Zouhair Magzhaoui, who is widely regarded as a paper candidate supportive of Saied, and the jailed leader of the liberal Azimoun party, Ayachi Zammel.

Weeks before the election, Zammel received two prison sentences – one for 20 months and another for six months – for falsifying paperwork relating to his candidacy. On October 1, he was sentenced to a further 12 years in prison in four cases related to voter endorsements. He has been behind bars since early September and is expected to remain there during the election. He says the charges against him are false and politically motivated.

In addition to Zammel, many of the country’s better-known politicians and party leaders who hoped to oppose Saied in the election have either been jailed or barred from running by the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) – a supposedly independent electoral commission that many say became an extension of the presidency under the wide-ranging reforms introduced by Saied since his power grab of July 2021.

The ISIE declared 14 of the 17 candidates who applied to participate in the election “ineligible”. Three of them – former ministers Imed Daimi and Mondher Znaidi and opposition leader Abdellatif Mekki – won their appeals against the ISIE’s decision before Tunisia’s Administrative Court, which is widely seen as the North African country’s last independent judicial body, since Saied dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council and dismissed dozens of judges in 2022.